Python 2.7? Also, the new Apache Arrow integration changes the python performance characteristics a lot; I wonder if they are using arrow for their JVM <-> CLR interop, if not that probably would be a good idea.
Your post made me curious and I raised the issue with MS at https://github.com/dotnet/spark/issues/45. I hope that benefits the community and gets MS on the right track (by finally supporting Arrow).
It would be interesting to hear about it from MS. Do you know of other settings / configurations / features that could greatly influence the result of such comparison?
Since we started replying to these points on the Github thread at https://github.com/dotnet/spark/issues/45, I am suggesting to continue the discussion there. As mentioned there, we want to be transparent with the benchmark code and systems we use. We are currently working on arrow support to compare fairly.